Ataman: ”We turned the match to our advantage with taking the offensive rebounds…”

“We accepted our physical superiority from the second quarter. We set our strategy on this for this match. We knew that Pınar Karşıyaka was weaker than us underneath the hoop and we focused on that. Therefore, we played with two tall. We have used Dunston and Stimac together. Actually, we struggled at the beginning on offense but we turned the advantage of the match to ourselves with taking the offensive rebounds. We played very well in the third quarter. Our defensive aggressiveness is raised with Doğuş’s return. We made some mistakes at the end of the match but at the end of the day we won the return match of the one that we lost in the first of the league and also gained two points.”

Our Captain Doğuş Balbay also stated his thoughts at the press conference as: “We need such victories in the league. These are good for our energy as because we stumble in the Euroleague unfortunately. I hope that the matches in Tahincioğlu Basketball Super League will raise us to another level and we would reach our targets. I congratulate Pınar Karşıyaka. They played very well. We were better especially on the aggressiveness and we stood sharp. Even though we raised the score difference to 20 points they knew to come-back and brought it down to 7 points. We didn’t give up aggressiveness today and we showed our fight to win for 40 minutes. We must concentrate on the Valencia match now. I hope that we can show our aggressiveness that we shown today on Thursday against Valencia as well.”